Overwatch teases new hero who might be this woman

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Overwatch, the hero shooter and popular ‘ship-em-up, has a habit of teasing its new characters ahead of their reveal. The whispering winds of Blizzard Entertainment are rising once again to give small, vague clues about the game’s next playable character. A tweet last week referred to a botched operation featuring Reinhart, the Germanic hero made of shoulders, and Torbjorn, the turret-building engineer who I think is Danish. There wasn’t much to this. But later, a post on the Overwatch website featured a letter from Torbjorn to his wife. The subject: their daughter. Thus, the internet has made up its mind. She’s the next hero.

She isn’t a nobody as far as Overlore goes. Brigitte (as she was called in a spin-off comic) has also appeared in the cinematic short Honor and Glory sporting the engineer-style clothes and cog tattoo of her dad. She’s also a minor presence in this scene of another comic, and looks to be the eldest of the claw-armed hero’s children . It makes sense to pick her out of the pile of periphery characters. Although it could all be a massive GAG. Maybe the real hero will be his wife? That’d be good. Or maybe it’s the redshirt of a soldier mentioned in the first tweet, a one “Private First Class Emre Sarioglu”. However, it does look like Brigitte is the sensible bet. I’m just disappointed none of these clues points toward the Junk Queen.

Previous heroes have always been teased. The multi-legged robo-gunner Orisa was revealed after Blizzard told everyone about the robot’s 11-year-old creator, Efi. The hacker character Sombra was revealed after a overdrawn ARG. And punch-loving angryman Doomfist had been an ethereal possibility since launch, with advertisements about him hanging around in the game’s maps.

As for the abilities and weapons of the upcoming character, all we’ve been told is that the hero is “very needed” suggesting that they’ll fill a gap in the shooter’s pool of warping, hacking, jumping, hovering, shielding, slicing, electrifying crowd of cartoon killers. Hmm, what is “very needed”? A hero who can talk the enemy into sitting down for a cup of hot chocolate? A heroine who can shoot seafood from her toenails? It’s all possible, friends.

You have Roadhog, Junkrat and Torbjorn that are downright ugly. Soldier 42 & Genji are disfigured. Bastion, Zenyatta & Winston aren’t humans (but still male). Reaper & Reinhardt had hidden faces in the original design (but in the end aren’t ugly, true).

For the women side of characters, there’s only Moira where people say “she’s not that pretty” (but still far from ugly) & Orisa (they still managed to put a cute little girl behind it, though). All the others are, pardon my french, absolutely bangable.

It’s common in the gaming industry to not have interesting ugly female characters, true (and sad), but Overwatch is a good example of it.

Ana is old and disfigured, so I don’t think she really counts as conventionally pretty. Torbjorn isn’t ugly, he looks fine for a Norwegian. Bastion is genderless (unlike Zenyatta who is clearly identified as male). But in general I do agree there’s an unfortunate bias towards women being similarly young and nice-looking, while the men have much more variety in age and ugliness and masks and cybernetics and species.

Sure she’s aged well, and the cartoonishness of the game smooths out the lines, but she’s pretty consistently portrayed as elderly in the comics, and looks in general she’s probably the least sexualized female character who isn’t an actual android centaur.

Muscular strong woman with butch cut, badass scared grandma missing an eye, mildly gender ambiguous David Bowie woman, and robot centaur were apparently not enough? Do you just need someone who is horribly disfigured or something?

Get a grip. Overwatch has made a delightfully diverse cast of heroes. Yes, they all look bad ass and cool in their own unique ways. That’s the point.

That’s only four examples on twelves characters. And yes, let’s talk about the muscular girl with cute small face and precise make-up, prettier than most girl you’d know. I’ll let you google “female weight lifting chmapions” and you’ll see Blizzard didn’t take any risks with Zarya at all.
Ana got old but the same way Reinhardt did, still nice looking. And I already expressed myself about Moira.
And don’t misunderstand me, I’m not saying that Overwatch’s female characters are bad or something, I’m just saying that their badassery could/should stand on itself without the help of good looks.

And yes, what I’d like to see is the medium making interesting ugly women main characters. For a change.

When are people finally gonna realize that they’re not being sexist? They’re just attempting to give people what they want. And the liberal minority is complaining because they don’t play the game enough to know about its diversity in characters.

@ParzivaltheSoldiermain :
You say they just give people what they want. Then is there something wrong with me saying I want some ugly female characters ?

Plus, I’ve been gaming and readings comics or mangas for a while now and yeah I’m sorry but I feel a bit insulted every time an author feels like their only targets are horny male teenagers. It’s not flattering to any guy that don’t need to see half naked ladies H24 and it’s not very welcoming to the other half of the population.

If Torbjorn is Danish, why is that letter to his wife written in Dutch?

I don’t think there’s any character mentioned in Overwatch lore that the internet hasn’t claimed is the next hero. Even when people agreed Blizzard couldn’t let you shoot 11-year-old Efi, they suggested she might sit safely in spawn remote-controlling a swarm of drones. I assume Blizzard is just trolling the community by mentioning Emre and Brigitte, so we’ll be surprised when they announce the new hero is actually Jetpack Cat.

Cool. Can’t wait for this lovingly designed and developed character to be added to the game so that everyone can repeatedly blow her brains out/ship her with reaper/make porn featuring her (and probably her father because…reality).

Has there ever been an in-fiction reason given why you can murder all these “heroes” repeatedly and they just pop right back up, yell a fun quip, and then run back out there to be bludgeoned to death again? There has always been something really incongruous to me about OW’s portrayal and what the game actually is. The shorts and comics make all the characters seem important and with deep motivations, but in the actual game they just seem to be completely disposable fodder obsessed with escorting trucks. It bugs me that so much effort is put into the window dressing when the game beneath is so…plain.

The reason given by Blizzard is the game is not part of the canon. The story is told by the comics and shorts and fictional news reports and the writer’s Twitter etc, minus all the silently retconned bits. The game is just a game and doesn’t have any deeper meaning.

The story seems pretty rubbish as a story anyway – what it mainly succeeds at is giving the characters some personality, and that makes the game more engaging, even if the plot is completely irrelevant to gameplay.

That is what I assumed. It just strikes me as ridiculous how much effort is put into giving these characters personalities and all that when the game itself (you know, the only part of this that actually matters) doesn’t concern itself with that stuff at all. Maybe give it a single player mode where we can actually play this story? Or come up with a more creative gameplay loop then “kill our beloved characters repeatedly” (I know the ship has already sailed for that second idea, but the first one seems pretty doable)?

Eh, I don’t live on a mountain made of money like Blizzard, so I guess I don’t know what I am talking about.

Sounds exactly like what would happen to a project that started out life as an MMO, was canned due to a studio owned by the same publisher also making an FPS MMO (Destiny), and left a development team with the task of turning the developed assets into a non-competing product.

They discussed Titan at a Blizzcon panel. From what I remember, competition wasn’t mentioned or implied – Titan just wasn’t working as a fun game, so it failed by itself. They said very little was reused in Overwatch – a small fraction of the game engine, some character concepts, and no art assets. So Overwatch was mostly developed from scratch, and its flaws are its own.

Well they were never going to come out and say the current version of Overwatch is a cast off thrown together from the assets of a project killed by a business decision. There’s probably more overlap than they are willing to admit, the Overwatch lore sets the stage for a two faction conflict and all of the cinematics from the time of release feature a broad range of the cast while still having no bearing on the game play whatsoever. Their version doens’t add up.

The point of “lore” in games like OW and MOBAs and essentially any hero based game somewhat eludes me. Its like all those overwrought League of Legends trailers and mini-movies…where we even see playable heroes get stabbed and gored in spectacular fashion…either serves to show that the actual game is just loosely related, and the lore is to give everything some barebones context, or that death and bludgeoning isnt the end for our heroes, and therefore there are no consequences. Creating lore for context and deliberately separating them seems like a whole lot of wasted work, unless you count it as marketing…which rings twice as hollow.

Unfortunately EA killed Dawngate before it got out of beta. A MOBA with an actual story. A proper, pre-planned narrative arc. Characters that weren’t caricatures or focus tested to death.

Basko’s monologue to his dead son, Zalgus flashing forward to two differing versions of the final battle of the story, Voluc’s whole tortured existence. If you wanna see story in a multiplayer game done properly, Dawngate is where it was at.

abstrarie,
Have you played the game for more than three minutes? Because it’s called a shooter because you shoot and people die this isn’t a bouncy house sweetheart, go back to playing my little pony if you can’t handle a shooter with personality.

It’s a lot of fun to me that there’s an actual letter in legible Swedish, but as tends to be the case with content made in a foreign language it reads a little weirdly to a native. It’s written in a pretty formal style — no contractions, no slang, no personal touches. No hint of Gothenburgian in word choice or structure either, which makes me a bit sad. It ends up reading a bit like he’s writing a letter to his lawyer or the script for a 60s radio drama, not so much a letter to his wife.

Also, godparents haven’t been a thing in the Church of Sweden since the 19th century or so. I guess they wrote themselves into a corner there, and I guess I can also pretend that in the near future letting large German men name your kid and agree to teach them about Jesus will be more of a thing in the most secular country in the world.

And which put the wrong kanji for “arrow” in one of the skin designs for a Japanese character.

For all the thought and storytelling that Blizzard puts into the visual designs of their characters, it’s funny how distinctly American the whole thing is, in the sense that it’s all built upon a weird mix of clichés and stereotypes that nevertheless manage to be passable to a wider audience. And then there’s a character like Sombra, which almost gets the voice localization right, missing the mark by millimeters. I don’t know, Overwatch is incredibly incoherent and at the same time it makes sense.

Yeah, I thought of World War 1 and 2 convalescent’s letters to loved ones as a possible point of reference but that doesn’t really make it read less oddly. My best guess is that they just asked whatever translation service they employ for business purposes to create a translation, and those value exactness and clarity more than style for obvious reasons.

Also, I think you might have your modernist director storage mildly scrambled. The 70s film adaptation of The Emigrants did star Max von Sydow and Liv Ullman, which is very Bergmanesque of it, but the director of that film and its sequel was Jan Troell, who also directed Here Is Your Life and others. Vilhelm Moberg wrote the original novels.

I thought the non-archaic version of godparent was just parents saying “this is a close family friend who will take care you if anything happens to us”. That was always my understanding with mine, anyway.

Now I had to look up the CoS’s definition of the term and I seem to be talking out of my arse. I blame my ignorance on being an unbaptized heathen unbeliever with a very limited interest in ritualized baby water splashing, I guess.

The church does still have some notion of godparent (“fadder”), and parents can nominate any number as long as they’re baptized and some denomination of Christian. Our recently popped baby royals apparently had 9 or so godparents each at their baptisms. The term is used interchangeably with witness.

Your godparents being your backup parents in case of emergency never really took root here, far as I can tell. It’s purely a christian spirit guide thing. I wouldn’t expect many swedes to care all that much about who gets to look marginally more solemn at their kid’s baptism but, again, heathen unbeliever.

Americans still do godparents (I had them), though it mostly lacks the religious connotations other than they’re customarily present at the baptism if you’re religious. So probably just a case of an American writer not knowing the culture well enough.

I’ll never understand why the gaming media gives a gambling company like blizzard that much free attention/advertisement for such a simple, non-innovative, boring thing as a character. There’s games out there with literally hundreds of them in them, they’ve been around for decades and so have online FPS. An article for this, really? I mean, they don’t even have to try any more. Who in their right mind would wait eagerly on an in-game character in any other game or read articles about them? People, it’s a freaking animated vertex puppet this company makes billions off…now that I think about it, there’s this new bottled water I could interest you in. It has a fancy name and a background story as well. RPS, you interested?